


These Violent Delights

by vforvillanelle



Category: Killing Eve (TV 2018)
Genre: F/F, I continue to shock and amaze myself, I still think The Ghost had a lot of unfulfilled potential for her arc, S2x05 was a masterpiece, also researching the Egg Ghost folklore, and then actually writing this fic??, are from this episode alone, at least half of my favourite scenes in this show, but honestly the forest interrogation was the most terrifying, masterfully crafted horror folks, sorry about the mess..., was creepy as hell too
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-17
Updated: 2019-05-17
Packaged: 2020-03-06 16:27:22
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,134
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18854746
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vforvillanelle/pseuds/vforvillanelle
Summary: Eve’s rage and impulsiveness get the best of her when she interrogates The Ghost with Villanelle.





	These Violent Delights

_These violent delights have violent ends_

_And in their triumph die, like fire and powder,_

_Which, as they kiss, consume.  
_

**Romeo and Juliet, Act 2 Scene 6**

* * *

 

The first time the door to the cargo container opened, that MI6 woman had asked The Ghost if she needed any water.

Such a hollow question did not deserve to be dignified with a response. Yet The Ghost allowed herself a small, thin smile and politely refused. She’d learned stoicism from hiking the unforgiving Taebaek mountain range in her native South Korea. Taebaek-san itself was renowned for the sparkling frost-coated foliage which covered its slopes in winter. Its highest peaks were hallowed ground, home to ancient Shamanist altars. On bright, clear days, the mountain offered tranquility and a cleansing sense of peace to the soul. When menacing clouds rolled in and shrouded the paths with fog and washed bones away with torrential rain, the soul quaked and was haunted.

The Ghost had visited the mountain adjacent to Taebaek-san only once. Ilwol-san was the Sun-Moon Mountain. It too was haunted and its peak graced the heavens with a somber, dignified air. Ilwol-san represented harmony in all things, a principle that The Ghost followed in both her personal and professional life. She had always strived to be different from her fellow competition, as different as night and day, but the balance would often require a draining amount of focus. Balancing her many roles and principles proved just as difficult.

The MI6 woman clearly had no such scruples.

“It’ll be easier if you just tell me. Or it’s going to get worse for you.”

Previous interrogations with her had been confusing. The Ghost found her difficult to read; she was polite but cold, distant yet unnervingly familiar, apparently clueless but unmistakably well informed. And she was _persistent_. So terribly persistent. Her questions cut to the bone and she was merciless when she sensed the right moment to go in for the kill. She spoke of no family, not even a partner. She was alone, an unwavering figure bathed in the cruel lights of the interrogation room, cowering behind a veneer of calm that barely contained the violence rippling just beneath her surface.

The Ghost had the distant thought that in another life, the MI6 woman would have made an exquisite Assassin. The pale white lights suddenly flickered on again as the container door opened. This time, The Ghost heard another woman’s accented voice ask:

“Would you like to watch?”

She came in then, the _dalgyal guishin_ , and The Ghost felt her blood freeze. The cursed creature was wearing a black dress. She was smiling, but the expression may as well have slid off the smooth surface of her blank face. It was a visage emptied of emotion and personality.

However, the MI6 woman called the _dalgyal guishin_ by another name.

“Villanelle, please don’t-don’t over do it. Alright?”

“Don’t worry, Eve. I will only do exactly what you ask me to. As long as it’s fun, I mean.”

The root of stoicism was resilience. The Ghost sat up straighter in the chair and lifted her chin as death approached, teasingly taking its time. Like a bamboo forest being lashed by snowstorms, The Ghost knew how to bend without breaking. She could draw strength from the many bonds that entwined themselves between the threads of her life; she recalled dear faces now, every sweet smile or interesting haircut, each figure of speech and distinctive dialect, all the earnest emotion shining from their eyes.

 _Dalgyal guishin_ were always alone. No family, no friends, no children. They left behind nothing but a legacy of death and despair. They were not capable of bonding. Nevertheless, this _dalgyal guishin_ certainly seemed to rely on that Eve woman.

“Eve, what do you know about our friend?”

“I know that she’s terrified of you.”

Pleased humming filled the container. “What else?”

“I know that she doesn’t like to leave blood when she kills.”

“What else?”

A pause. “I know that she has two children.”

For her first born, The Ghost had helped with an art project involving numerous bottles of glitter, glue, and construction paper. For her second child, The Ghost had packed an egg salad sandwich for lunch the morning she’d been apprehended by MI6. Already, it was a far off memory. Something that had once happened to someone else, someone who was not currently handcuffed and chained to a chair inside a shipping container located in the middle of a forest.

In her culture, Shamanism emphasized a form of detachment, precisely because Shamans were considered conduits between this world and the spirit world. They did not care so much about the message they were delivering as much as they prided themselves on the way they delivered it: with dignity, integrity, and professionalism.

 _Don’t kill the messenger_ , a Shaman had once reminded The Ghost. She’d found him praying at an altar near the top of the mountain. Cold, out of breath, hungry, tired-The Ghost sank down on her knees beside him and inhaled the incense wafting up to her.   
  
_I’m not here to kill you._

_No?_

_I am just trying to make it to the top._

He’d inclined his head then, a generous gesture that she had not expected him to indulge in.

_What do you expect to find there?_

_I don’t know._

The Ghost had found such a profound sense of detachment there that for days after coming down the mountain, the feeling continued to excavate her chest. She had decided to fill the void with a husband and two children. To defy the detachment by bonding, by connecting, by considering the way her marks would die as painlessly as possible so that she could restore harmony to the more wholesome side of her life.   

Despite her very best attempts, however, Villanelle was clearly a bringer of chaos and disorder. The Ghost regarded her contemptuously as she drew close enough for The Ghost to notice the embroidery around the sequins on her dress.

“You are very brave for bringing children into a world so full of monsters. Isn’t she, Eve?”  
  
Eve remained silent. She was still standing stiffly near the container door.  

“I’d hate to think about how long your children would survive in this world without you. What school do they go to?”

The Ghost allowed herself to direct a furious gaze at Villanelle. She smirked, folded her hands before her in a gesture of patience.

“North London Korean School,” Eve supplied. “It’s actually part of a Catholic school, they just rent out a few classrooms.”

“Thank you, Eve.”

She’d forgotten to kiss her firstborn goodbye that morning, The Ghost suddenly realized. She was going to make _japchae_ for dinner, after stopping to buy beef in the supermarket on her way home from her job; she’d even chopped some vegetables before leaving and neatly arranged them on a yellow dish in the middle of the kitchen. It was a lovely detail, this yellow dish, it was just as yellow as-

The piss suddenly flowing down The Ghost’s thighs, streaming down her legs, pooling at her feet, spreading beneath the chair. She screwed her eyes shut and imagined herself breathing the clear air of Taebaek-san.

“We can do this the easy way,” Eve offered. Her voice was closer now.

The Ghost’s eyes snapped open. Villanelle had crossed her arms and looked affronted. Eve’s tone was like the one from before, when she’d asked about the water.

“Just tell us about the hits on Alistair Peel and his colleagues. Who ordered them? Why?”

Detachment. It haunted her. It could also be her ally sometimes. Detachment, from her chopped vegetables in the kitchen; from that yellow dish that her husband had bought her after she’d broken her wrist chasing a mark through the streets of Delhi; from her children’s pajamas and their laughter and their curious, wondrous questions; from their favourite meals and their scrapes and bruises after learning to ride their bicycles and trying rollerblading; from her role as a wife and mother, from all her friends and mentors, from that Shaman on the mountain; from _all of it_ , until she regained equilibrium inside her mind enough to decide that if she could somehow make it out of this container alive, all that mattered was finding The Twelve and completing her audition by eliminating their threat against her life, permanently.

“I can tell you. But first…”  
  
“Yes?” Eve leaned forward earnestly.   
  
“I want you to answer my question truthfully.”

“I think we are the ones doing the interrogating here,” said Villanelle.

“Let her ask. It’ll be easier this way. What’s your question?”  
  
“I asked you before, if you were interested in knowing yourself what killing felt like.” The Ghost swivelled her head from side to side, irritated at the blindfold’s hot material against her neck. “Well? Are you interested?”

“I already answered that question.”  
  
“You said that you did not have the stomach for it. But you are here.”

The Ghost could see all emotion wipe itself from Eve’s face. It was a strange transformation, as if The Ghost had just splashed a vat of fried oil across her face and melted away any recognizable trace of humanity. The Ghost’s words seemed to cauterize the flesh there and melt the bone underneath.   
  
“This is your last chance,” Eve hissed.   
  
“Oooh!” came Villanelle’s smooth accompaniment.

“Tell me who ordered the hits and why, or the next time your children walk out of that school, I’ll have snipers splatter their little brains all over the hopscotch drawing.”

Detachment urged The Ghost to take a deep breath and say:

“So be it. Alistair Peel’s son ordered the hits.”

“What?” Eve and Villanelle spoke in unison. 

Eve pressed The Ghost:

“Aaron? But he already owns the company, why would he-”  
  
“He is not after the company.”

“Then what is he after? Tell us!”

The Ghost remained silent. The angle of her head was regal and resolute.

“I think she is done talking to us.” Villanelle peered into The Ghost’s eyes so deeply that she felt like her soul was slowly being sucked dry. The Ghost did not look away, not even when her bleary vision registered that Eve had shrugged her coat off.

“Villanelle, take her handcuffs off.”

“Couldn’t we start with something a little more exciting?”

Eve glared at her then bent down to fidget with The Ghost’s handcuffs herself. They were stubborn, metal clinking against metal as Eve worked to pry them loose. The Ghost remained still. She marvelled at Eve’s stupidity, the sheer dumb luck of an MI6 agent intentionally freeing the hands of an Assassin. It wouldn’t take much for The Ghost to kill her, really: if she leaned in far enough, The Ghost could probably strangle her or even pluck her eyes out. Villanelle was the problem, however, with her lithe form and terrifying reflexes.

Which meant that when Eve finally did slip the handcuffs off and toss them aside, The Ghost could still do nothing more than let her arms fall limply to her sides. In a few moments, the numbness around her wrists would fade and proper circulation would return. And then…

The Ghost almost didn’t register the slap across her face until the hot sting began to spread across her cheek. Another slap, harder this time, rocketing her face to the other side. Her breaths came ragged.

When Eve reared for a third strike, The Ghost lunged forward. The shackles binding her ankles to the chair restricted her reach. She tried to claw at Eve’s face, hissing and thrashing against her restraints.

Eve coolly took a step back.   
  
“Grab her arms, Villanelle.”   
  
The sizzling of the lights were the only sound in the container as The Ghost bit her tongue to keep from crying out when Villanelle seized her by the wrists and wrenched her arms back so sharply that her shoulder joints almost popped out of their sockets.   
  
She kept pulling. Slowly.

It was as if the _dalgyal guishin_ had truly possessed The Ghost. Her heart was held in an icy grip, her mind paralyzed by a feeling so primal that it was the very foundation that mountains rested on; the bones and filth and blood-soaked soil of thousands of generations before her, crushed under the weight of an unstoppable force that was in turn fueled by an insatiable will to dominate.

The Ghost could feel the pain searing through her arms now, flowing as swiftly as a river streaming from a peak down to a valley. Her hips were locked in an unnatural angle, her torso beared backwards while her feet remained stationary. The Ghost tried thrashing her head and shoving her body weight backwards on the chair in an effort to unbalance Villanelle.

Eve watched her struggle with her head tilted to one side. She seemed to be soaking in the pants, the sharp scent of sweat mingling with the sour stench of piss, the dirt on the floor, the blood red walls of the container glistening in slick anticipation of what was to come. The white lights bared down on them all, but the silence was most oppressive of all.

And still, Villanelle drew The Ghost’s arms back.

“What is Aaron Peele after?”

Muscles screamed in protest. A cacophony of quaking tendons and tissue and bones creaking in defiance of the force unceasingly applied to them. A chorus of the damned wailing in her veins, sloshing the blood past the banks of their proper cavities. Some distant warning burned at the back of The Ghost’s skull.

She tried conjuring the mountain trail, lined with cherry blossoms at its base. She tried envisioning the pleasant warmth of the sun as it blessed her face. She tried focusing on a spot just past Eve’s head, some ridiculous hinge of the container door that had creaked whenever it opened. She tried not to scream when Villanelle sharply tugged her arms, tried to plunge her hand into the depths of detachment, but failed.

The Ghost was yelling something now, her mind floundering as her forearms bent. They were now approaching the deceptively feather-light fractures that would come before the final, crunching breaks. The pain mounted. So did her screams, screams that cascaded into the room like rock fall.

“Weapon? Did you say a weapon?”  
  
Eve’s voice rang out clearly. She motioned for Villanelle to release The Ghost’s arms when she nodded weakly. 

“So Aaron is after a weapon...do you think The Twelve want it?”  
  
Villanelle snorted. “Depends on the weapon.”   
  
“Ask her.”   
  
The Ghost shuddered as Villanelle’s lips brushed against her ear. Insidious whispers crawled inside The Ghost’s brain, prickling their way inside like spiders clambering into holes that shunned the daylight. A terrible web suffocated her thoughts as Villanelle continued to murmur vividly, spinning visions that made The Ghost flinch and recoil as far as her restraints would allow. Hot tears stung her eyes. Her lips moved as if they did not belong to her, and the answer that Villanelle drew from them made her smirk.

“It’s always a weapon. The Twelve want it, everyone wants it.”

“Good.”

“I got you what you wanted, Eve. We’re done here.”

“No,” said Eve. “We’re not quite done yet.”

She picked up the handcuffs again. Her tone was thoughtful as she commanded:  
  
“Put her blindfold back on.”

The darkness was complete. It was like being alone amidst graves in the middle of a moonless night, reaching out blindly to meet cracked stone and death’s initials carved into eternity.

The Ghost heaved when she felt the cold touch of the handcuffs against the side of her throat. The sharp point where the locks clasped together dug into her trembling, hyper-sensitive skin.

“How did you do that, earlier?” Eve’s voice was close, her grip unwavering.   
  
“Do what?”

“Pull her arms back without completely breaking them? I-I’ve never done that before and I just…” A shaky laugh escaped Eve. “I don’t know my own strength, I guess.”

Whispers joined the conspiring, flickering lights. A moment later, The Ghost heard:

“Come, I will show you, darling Eve.”

The Ghost thrashed. She tried to topple the chair onto its side. She snarled and rasped and tugged against her shackles. Her feet instinctively rebelled, seeking purchase against the container’s floor, but the dirt was smooth and only slid against the sole of her shoes.   
  
She could sense both of them lingering behind her. She braced herself for the inevitable ripping of her arms and gritted her teeth.

The handcuffs tinkled. Then reality detached from itself when the chain leashed around The Ghost’s throat and wrenched her head back.

Fog rolled into The Ghost’s mind and clouded her vision. The metal links dug into her throat, causing bubbles of precious air to gurgle and push themselves past raw lips. Behind the blindfold, The Ghost’s eyes watered and strained in their sockets, bulging with each deeper impression of the links. She heard the clamour of metal, felt it strain as the slack grew shorter and shorter and shorter and shorter, a feat made only possible by the strength of two pairs of hands.

It was not the sound of her windpipe inevitably crushing that made The Ghost nauseous. It was not the chime of metal links jerking and bruising and straining. Rather, it was a sound so bewilderingly out of place and yet so undeniable that The Ghost felt her stomach plummet as if it had been shoved down twelve flights of stairs.

It was the unmistakable smack of lips conjoining, then pulling apart, only to come together again and again to be washed anew with greedy  gasps and pants.

The chain faltered in time with the increasing fervor of kisses until it suddenly spiralled to the floor. Then The Ghost’s blindfold was ripped off. It dangled from the _dalgyal guishin’s_ grip. Eve was slightly hunched over. Her hands were shaking and her face was obscured by her fall of curly hair.

“Monster,” The Ghost managed to rasp out as soon as she’d slumped down the chair.

Eve straightened, her features denying access to any truth beyond the dark seed it buried at the core of her words. She closed the distance between herself and The Ghost by pressing the sharp edge of the handcuffs against her jugular vein while Villanelle looked on adoringly.

“If you call me that again, I’ll cut your throat open so that you drown in your own blood.”

When the threat had lingered long enough, the handcuffs landed behind The Ghost. Terror kept her head bowed. She could not raise it even to witness their departure. But with her eyes cast down, The Ghost could have sworn that their feet seemed to float above the ground, not quite making contact with either this world or the next.


End file.
